Lucky Strike
by inbox
Summary: Injured and pained and exhausted, Boone finally breaks under the pressure of Courier's reckless behaviour. Written for the Fallout Kink Meme.


Another prompt from the Fallout Kink Meme. This time the prompt was 'spanking' and, as always, I kind of 180-ed the request. I'm just not good at writing erotica, I guess! Thank you in advance for reading.  
Full prompt request: _Spanking - Please? Oh, Boone, lay it on thick. Points if it's because she's doing something derpy we all do when playing and it pisses him off (using Boone as a human shield, aggroing the entire waste, etc.)_

* * *

Boone swore at her, loud and crude, spilling out his frustration into the dead night air. She was reckless and childish and never thought ahead, and she put him in danger and this _wasn't how he was supposed to go_. He wanted to die with an ocean of blood behind him and the point of a knife in his immediate future, he wanted to die with his hands covered in viscera and the constant white noise of guilt in his head finally silenced. He didn't want to die here in the desert, staring at the face of a cold indifferent moon, a victim of animals and thirst and her reckless fucking stupidity. Always dragging them into needless danger. Always taking anything but the safe route. Always leading them into injury. He swore she enjoyed it, got off somehow on putting herself into situations that left her – him – shattered and broken and limping into the shadows.

His voice echoed up the canyon walls and he didn't care that they bounced and tumbled off the rocks, echoing back to repeat his words over and over again. There was no one here to listen. The Great Khans had moved out silently days, even weeks before, pride smarting from her fast words and a worn copybook full of plans to reduce them to little more than cattle. It had been masterful at the time, but now even that enraged him – so smart one moment, so irredeemably stupid the next. A leader needed stability and Boone needed a leader, someone to capably guide him to his destiny, not someone with no craft or common sense or reliability.

He didn't falter when she reeled back and punched him in an effort to wall up the cascade of words spilling out of his mouth. Her fist slammed into the meat below his collarbone and he barely felt it, endorphins running white hot and repressing the constant pain that came along from being around her – a patchwork pain of infected Nightstalker bites and a broken tooth (a rifle butt to the jaw and the good fortune for it to have missed his eye) and a thumbnail ripped half off and still oozing red raw and blisters and shin splints and hunger and thirst and and and...

She punched him again and he caught her wrist this time, yanking her off balance and into his own bulk, pinning her arms in front of her chest. Courier swore back at him and kicked wildly before landing a lucky strike, one ankle hooking behind his knee and buckling the tendons until he stumbled. It was the opportunity she needed to drop him to the red sand below, driving her elbows into his stomach and wrenching herself free.

He lay there staring at the impartial night sky wheeling above, trying to fight the base survival instinct to suck back all the breath she'd knocked out of his chest, his head a seething mass of fury and shame and impotence and a tangled knot of things he couldn't even begin to comprehend.

She crawled away, out of reach, and Boone could tell without looking that her muscles were tensed, ready to spring. He could hear her breathing heavily, great lungfuls of cold desert air that would steam when she exhaled. Let her run then. It'd get her out of his sight and then he'd be less likely to snap like a high tension line.

"You're fucked up, you know that?"

He didn't reply.

"You're messed in the head."

He remained silent. The truth didn't need a response.

–

Time passed. The moon tracked overhead and he measured its transit for the sake of something to watch. Hours ago Courier had vanished into the building that formerly housed the Great Khan leader and he'd chosen to stay outside, not wanting to be trapped in a small airless room with her. His palms prickled when he thought about her too much, his anger manifesting in a desire to hit, to hurt.

He didn't have any alcohol to make his limbs heavy and his eyes heavier and there were no painkillers, everything of medical value sold or given away days ago. If he'd been the sort of person to appreciate irony he would have found that delicious – wanting to tamp down irrationality and rage with a heaping dose of Med-X delivered into the crook of his arm when there wasn't even anything to take away the stabbing pain of his tooth or the seething burn of the infected bites on his thigh – but he didn't much care for twisty thinking.

Instead he said he'd stay on watch, and sat cross-legged on a thin, abandoned sleeping mat and watched the moon, ignoring the cold air and the insects biting at his skin. It was easier to watch a dead canyon than it was to deal with her.

–

The sliver of light spilling across the dirt gave away her approach long before the soft pad of bare feet on dirt. Dawn wasn't far away, a pink blush staining the sky in the east.

"You should come in," she said softly before hesitantly kneeling next to him. Courier patted his arm and he fought the urge to flinch away. "You're going to make yourself sick, being out in the cold like this. Come inside."

He told her he was fine. To go away. It'd be dawn soon and they could move on to whatever it is she intended to do next. Whatever pointless trek she planned. _Whatever dragged him inexorably away from the east and the Fort and her goddamn worthless promises_, he added silently.

The hand on his forearm slide along muscle and skin and rubbed at his shoulder and this time he did flinch away, a hot flare of something acidic burning up from his stomach.  
"Stop," he snapped, pleased when she drew her hand back as if she'd been burned.

She had the affront to look hurt. "I don't understand. I just..."

He turned on her. "You don't understand _anything_. You just keep taking me away from what I want. What you promised. You keep trying to fix me." It was the most he'd ever said in one breath to her, and her eyes widened as she leaned away from the verbal barrage.

She recovered almost as quickly, and that damn hand crept back onto his shoulder. "Boone, I just thought... I thought we could work together. That you'd trust me and maybe you'd let me in. We make a great pair. You and me, Boone. _Craig_. I want to..."

Boone didn't let her finish, not wanting to hear whatever silly fantasy she was about to spill out. He twisted awkwardly, snatching her hand off his shoulder with an iron-hard grip strong enough to make her shriek. A sharp yank pulled her forward and he heard her shoulder pop at the sudden force, her free hand scrabbling to gain traction and prevent her from driving her face into his knee.

He was expecting her to fight like a cornered coyote, screaming and scratching and maybe finally absolving him of this need to keep trudging at her heels in case she actually stuck her her promise to deliver him straight into his destiny. Boone wasn't expecting her to look up him from the painful twist he'd driven her into, cheeks flushed and her eyes big and dark as she bit at her lip as if holding back something that played at the edge of his hearing. A tiny sound that, despite the howl of white noise in his head, was familiar enough to make him pause.

Courier gave a choked sob as he pushed harder on her wrist and twisted it further up her back, arching her back to relieve the pressure until he shifted enough to force his kneecap square into her solar plexus, ignoring the ripping pain scything down his leg as infected wounds, barely knitted over to begin with, split and began weeping pus all over again.

He gave one last hard shove down and let go, expecting her to roll away and clutch at her chest and scream bloody murder at him and flee to inevitably press the muzzle of a gun against his forehead. Instead she lay across his lap, her head pressed into the crook of his knee, panted deep ragged breaths. Boone made to shove her off and then, there, that sliver of sound again. A moan, bitten off before it could start. Not a sound of pain, but pleasure.

Oh.

She whispered with her face pressed into the canvas of his trousers, a litany of _please_ and _Boone_ whispered into cotton. He was beyond the point where he could even be surprised, split instead between realisation that this makes so many other things make sense, and that same bubbling wellspring of anger rising now that, yet again, she's managed to turn something into all about her. The same prickling in his palms returned and this time he acted on the impulse to strike out, a crack as the flat of his hand struck flesh loud enough to echo around the canyon.

"This is what you want?" he asked flatly, knowing her answer.

Again the whispered chorus of _yes_ and _please_ and she untwisted herself enough that her cheek was pressed into his thigh and he could feel her breasts pressed against him as she found her balance on her knees, arching her hips. He almost felt drunk as he smacked – no, not smacked. That's for parents and lovers, two things that he is most decidedly not – he hit the seam between buttock and thigh hard enough to push her forward. She looks up at him again, her mouth a perfect pretty 'o' as she gasped and pressed her hips back onto his hand.

He pushed her off his lap, letting her tumble into the dirt and roll over to stare at him with wide eyes as he got to his feet and took unsteady steps back, head reeling.

"You're fucked up, you know that?"

She didn't reply.

"You're messed in the head."

She remained silent. The truth didn't need a response.


End file.
